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“About Miracles”: Seeing the “real thing” in  
Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach and  
Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert 
 

Jacob Hovind, Towson University, jrhovind@gmail.com    
 

Abstract 
Hong Sang-soo’s cinema is one in which his characters consistently avoid reality, whether by constructing 
explanatory narratives and patterns or by turning other people into emotionally projected images. Woman 
on the Beach (2006), this article argues, openly diagnoses this tendency and finds instead what one of its 
characters calls “the real thing.” Placing this film in the context of Hong’s oeuvre as a whole, I explore 
Hong’s cinema as an ethical one, whose overarching interest lies in trying to see “the real thing” instead of 
imaginatively constructing it. And thus, in a career frequently compared to Rohmer’s, Woman on the 
Beach, with its search for this almost mystical encounter with reality, emerges as Hong’s variation on 
Rohmer’s own search for what’s real in Le Rayon vert (1986).                                                             
Keywords: Hong Sang-soo; Woman on the Beach; Éric Rohmer; Le Rayon vert; reality; vision 

 

 
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Volume 9.1 (2021)  |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.326  |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 



     CINEJ Cinema Journal: “About Miracles”: Seeing the “real thing” in Hong Sang-soo and Éric Rohmer 

  Volume 9.1 (2021)  |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.326 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 247 

 
“About Miracles”: Seeing the “real thing” in  Hong Sang-soo’s 
Woman on the Beach and Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert  
Jacob Hovind 

 

Introduction  
In Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom (2014), Japanese visitor Mori spends his days in 

Seoul aimlessly waiting for the woman he came there to see, stumbling into so many ways to 

pass the time with the locals around him. His small adventures are told via a series of letters he 

writes Kwon, the woman he’s waiting for, though at the film’s start Kwon drops the letters and 

we see their events in the achronologically jumbled order in which she reads them. The 

structural device’s purpose is suggested by one of the books Mori happens to be reading during 

his stay. “It says time is not a real thing,” he explains, “like your body, my body, or this table. 

Our brain makes up the mindframe of time continuity, past and present and future. I think we 

don’t have to experience life like that, necessarily, as a species. But at the end we cannot 

escape from this frame of mind because our brain evolved this way, I don’t know why.” Our 

mind may naturally want to turn things into organized patterns and linear, cause-and-effect 

structures, but as Mori’s book suggests, solving any of these patterns’ puzzles wouldn’t 

necessarily bring us any closer to complete understanding of all the frequently messy lived 

reality contained within them. Instead, he later tries to explain that he’s happiest when he 

simply looks at flowers, or trees: “I can look at them for a very long time, and after maybe five 

minutes, I feel I am really with that flower. I forget about everything else, who am I, what I did 

before, what the world is about, and time, and everything!” And in a film that structurally 

performs the idea that the events of Mori’s days in Seoul might have meaning independent of 

an arbitrarily imposed chronological structure, Mori identifies a tension that in some way 



 

 

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248 

haunts Hong’s entire oeuvre. His films consistently explore the frequently vast gulf between 

the games and structures we tend to impose on reality, and the meaning of this reality on its 

own. Mori finds happiness by gazing at a flower that just is, independent of any context, in 

contrast to so many of Hong’s protagonists, who awkwardly, frequently drunkenly, miss out on 

Mori’s bliss by failing to see what – or more specifically in matters of the heart, who – is right 

there in front of them.  

If Hong’s cinema is justly celebrated as a structuralist one, then this reputation 

frequently elides all the ways his various structural gambits serve to perform what is ultimately 

a profoundly ethical vision. While Mori’s able to see the flower for nothing more than what it 

is, more frequently Hong’s protagonists (and almost solely his male ones) experience what we 

can call a missed perceptual encounter with reality, one that ultimately occurs because of the 

ways they impose their ideas of other people onto one another instead of facing up to each 

other’s realities. Whether they’re chasing a constructed ideal or turning a person into a 

character, Hong’s men consistently fail to actually notice what’s real, seeing instead only so 

many refractions of their own headspaces and emotional projections. It’s a perceptual failing 

that’s ultimately an epistemological one, with so many failed romantic encounters that are 

ultimately failed ethical encounters; so many ways of avoiding the reality of other people, so 

many ways of remaining trapped in the narrative dead-ends and recursive feedback loops of 

their own claustrophobic narcissism. And it’s in his seventh film, Woman on the Beach (2006), 

that Hong most explicitly diagnoses the logic behind his characters’ perceptual-ethical failures, 

while also staging an alternative path toward approaching reality on its own terms, free from 

the blind spots of those arbitrarily imposed “mindframes” described by Mori. And if Hong’s 

mis-seeing men and all their over-intellectualized avoidance of reality consistently mark his 



 

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cinema’s affinity to that of Éric Rohmer’s, that Hong indeed might be the twenty-first century’s 

great moralist filmmaker taking on the mantle of the French master’s project, then in learning 

how to approach what one of its characters repeatedly calls “the real thing,” Woman on the 

Beach looks back to Le Rayon vert (1986) specifically; while Hong’s men are consistently left 

trapped more or less in their own heads, then Woman on the Beach imagines a woman, like 

Rohmer’s Delphine before her, who learns instead to gaze out to sea, getting a glimpse of 

something real. 

 

Hong Sang-soo’s ethical games with reality 

From his feature debut, The Day the Pig Fell into a Well (1996) and its oblique 

narrative strategy of switching from one character’s seemingly isolated plot to another until 

their relations only gradually become clear, to his most recent exercise in Cézanne-like 

cinematic cubism, The Woman Who Ran (2020), Hong has gained a reputation as one of 

contemporary cinema’s great structuralists and puzzle-makers. Christopher Small, for instance, 

describes Hong’s reputation “as a reliable art-house brand” built of “a handful of pet themes 

and formal eccentricities” (Small, 2016), while Marshall Deutelbaum, one of Hong’s earliest 

scholarly critics writing in English, has written a number of essential articles exhaustively close 

reading the patterns and structures of films like The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), 

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), and HaHaHa (2010). Meticulously 

documenting the “careful organization” of the latter film’s narrative chronology, Deutelbaum 

finds that Hong, despite the filmmaker’s claims toward the looseness of his production methods 

and his affinity for embracing chance and the aleatory, “remains as self-conscious of a 

cinematic craftsman as he ever has been” (Deutelbaum, 2012, p. 165). Because of this self-

consciousness of his narrative craft, and the frequently experimental nature of his narrative 



 

 

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structures’ complexity, Hong has been variously read by critics as a filmmaker whose  familiar 

bag of narrative and formal tricks – his repetitions and doublings, his characteristic seemingly 

unmotivated zooms within long takes, his narrative bifurcations and splintered paths – mark 

him as belonging to the self-reflexive tradition of essayistic filmmaking (Marc Raymond, 

2014), or, as Terez Vincze has recently argued, to the post-classical storytelling mode of “the 

puzzle film trend” (2019, p. 174).    

David Bordwell, similarly, includes Hong within the school of “Asian minimalism,” 

along with such towering figures of slowness as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Jia 

Zhang-ke, sharing their penchant for long takes, fixed cameras, and medium distance. 

“Accepting the visual premises of the style,” however, Hong “has developed a strikingly 

original approach to overall narrative architecture” (2007, p. 22). But just as important as the 

narrative architecture is the way his characters see their worlds within the intricately 

constructed games and puzzles that ensnare them. Throughout his oeuvre, I argue, Hong’s films 

are primarily about what his characters see and how they see it, or even more importantly, what 

his characters fail to see, or how they mis-see both the things and people they look at and 

what’s in their mind’s eyes. Indeed, if Hong’s most widely celebrated signature is his toolbox 

of structures, then these structures are ultimately a means to translate into narrative terms the 

ethical consequences of all these failures of vision his characters suffer from. Hong himself, 

early in his career, described his cinema as one ultimately uninterested in reality as an 

objective, Newtonian entity, but rather as a thing each of us organizes according to our own 

principles, desires, projections, and emotional baggage: "People tell me that I make films about 

reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up."1 In his films, 

especially those in the first half of his career, we experience reality not as it actually is, but as 



 

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his characters fail to see it, as filtered through all the knowledge and projections and 

presuppositions that cloud their vision. 

And all his soju-soaked narrative gamesmanship, these repetitions, uncanny doublings, 

bifurcations, and significantly insignificant detours, becomes the vehicle through which he 

formally performs this intersubjective trap. Writing on Hong’s earliest films, Akira Mizuta 

Lippit similarly suggests how his formal strategies mirror his ethical concerns, arguing that 

Hong’s characters consistently run up against “an impenetrable force, one that overwhelms the 

subject.” And each time, confronted with the demand of the unknown, they “turn around, turn 

their backs, turn away,” such that “Hong’s cinema is not one of limits and ends, but of 

repetitions, returns, and resumed lines” (Lippitt, 2004, p. 26). A Tale of Cinema (2005) marks 

the purest distillation of his early-career structural play, a structural gambit as bold as it is 

elegant in its simplicity; a film cut straight down the middle, with life on one side and cinema 

on the other. Notably, as Tong-su goes about trying to recreate in reality what he experienced 

watching his old friend’s film, chasing a feeling art gave him and trying to make it real, this 

film also marks Hong’s introduction of the seemingly arbitrary or unmotivated zoom into his 

films, a tic that will soon come to define his cinema. While Tong-su uses the mediated 

experience of art to try to make sense of his life by arranging it on his own film-inspired terms, 

Hong’s camera begins to work more independently, almost unpredictably and untethered to any 

logic, as if wondering what’s important in what it looks at without ever quite being able to 

know for sure. 

 

 But it’s Hong’s following film, Woman on the Beach, that makes a startling break from 

the structural experimentation that has most commonly come to define his cinema. A 

straightforwardly linear pastoral, its seaside setting reminiscent of his second film, The Power 



 

 

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of Kangwon Province, the film is perhaps the least narratively experimental of his career. And 

yet for all its superficial simplicity, the film becomes a kind of meta-commentary on the 

tendencies introduced in the first third of Hong’s cinema thus far, and those that will become 

ever more elaborate in the following years; without his cinema’s usual doublings and divisions, 

Hong seems to be wondering why he ever introduced them at all as a means of organizing his 

world of feckless men and wryly bemused woman. No formally imposed repetitions or echoes 

here, as the characters freely find ways to do it themselves, organizing their own reality with so 

many unbreakable behavior patterns and discursive feedback loops, so many ways of avoiding 

the work of seeing what’s real right in front of them.  

Writing on parallelism in Hong’s structures, Michael Unger has identified three main 

methods by which parallel structures emerge in Hong’s films. Unlike the “twice-told tales” of 

HaHaHa or Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, or the “circular loop” of The Day He 

Arrives (2011), he places Woman on the Beach in the group of films that unfold linearly but in 

two distinct narrative blocks: “But shared repetitions of gestures, characters, locations and bits 

of dialogue between the two narrative blocks make them bend on themselves” (Unger, 2012, 

pp. 145-146). But what needs to be added to Unger’s taxonomy of Hongian parallelism, as we 

shall soon see, is that Jung-rae’s frustrated filmmaker invents these very repetitions, even going 

so far as to try to create in his second narrative block’s reality bits of dialogue from the first. 

It’s a kind of parallelism as projection, not so far from Tong-su’s bungled attempt to make a 

film become real; trying to mold one slice of reality into a more successful version of one that 

didn’t quite work the first time around. And beyond its sly employment of repetition within 

linearity, the film also notably continues Hong’s experimentations with the zoom effect he had 

introduced in his previous film, as if the camera’s struggling to find whatever it is that his 



 

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253 

characters keep on missing. Indeed, as Marc Raymond suggests, it’s in Woman on the Beach 

that Hong’s use of the zoom becomes an essential way of diagnosing the failures of its male 

protagonist, revealing “the politics of this aesthetic” (Raymond, 2014, p. 26). The zoom both 

becomes a way of seeing characters more clearly than they can see themselves, and, like Mori 

with his flower, a way to focus on what’s there independent of whatever narrative we create 

around it, seemingly unimportant objects or characters caught in casual gestures; and it’s a way 

of looking the film will suggest its characters might benefit from emulating if they could ever 

find such clear-eyed focus.  

The film begins in Seoul, where filmmaker Kim Jung-rae decides he needs some peace 

and quiet in order to work on his next screenplay; though evidently not too much peace and 

quiet, as he’s so quick to let his friend and colleague Chang-wook bring along his girlfriend 

Mun-suk. Soon after the three arrive in the seaside town of Shinduri, largely depopulated 

during the overcast off-season, we learn that the screenplay is called “About Miracles,” a title 

that seems initially jarring for Hong’s thoroughly earth-bound cinema of the quotidian. And 

when Mun-suk asks him what kind of miracle he’s interested in, he gives a long explanation 

that sounds like it could be the set-up of some as-yet-unmade Hong film: 

 

A man travels to a foreign beach and stays at a hotel. And in his room he plays Mozart 

on his CD player. Then he leaves his room he hears the same music on the elevator. He 

walks out of the hotel, then takes a turn at the corner, and on the street is a clown. He’s 

doing his mime to the exact same music. It’s an incredible coincidence. But this man 

doesn’t think it’s a mere coincidence. He wonders why he hears the same music three 

times. And he concludes that if he can find the reason why this happened, he can 



 

 

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unravel a secret to the world. And he’s obsessed with that thought. So he starts tracking 

hints.  

 

“Sounds like a real mystery,” Mun-suk says, and indeed Jung-rae goes on to describe the 

detective work of his protagonist, finding as much information as he can about the clown’s life 

and even the manufacturer of the hotel’s stereo equipment, as if such material facts might lead 

to this almost cosmic “secret of the world” whose existence he dimly suspects. “Anyway, in the 

end, he finds this very thin string that links everything,” he explains. “But that string, even if he 

finds it, well, it’s something like a soul. There is nothing bodily, it’s very, very light.” Jung-rae 

betrays himself as, like Hong, “a metteur en order – an imposer or maker of order, a finder of 

hidden forms” (Quandt, 2007). And of course, where does such a need to impose order come 

from but a nagging suspicion that you’re dealing with things that have none on their own, or at 

least have some order that remains frustratingly hidden. “A maker of order” justifies his actions 

by convincing himself he’s a “finder of hidden forms,” equating the two as Quandt’s 

parallelism does. In the case of Jung-rae’s film, this reality whose orderlessness he can’t bear is 

the inexplicable repetition of minor coincidences, these things that Hong himself once 

celebrated in an interview with Huh Moonyung: “I welcome strange coincidences, and think 

that they are like a wedge driven into the frame of a banal and conventional mind.” And in 

foregrounding such coincidences in his films, especially insofar as they defy any narrativizing 

or logical explanation, Hong states that he “would like the audience to feel the space that is 

open beyond the broken structure” (Huh, 2007, p. 57). 

 



 

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 Like little shards of reality that only throw into relief how unreal our narrative 

constructions and arbitrarily imposed patterns are, coincidences in Hong’s universe suggest all 

the ways in which the world frequently defies explanation. Things, more often than not, don’t 

mean any specific thing, but they just simply are. In the mostly Paris-set Night and Day (2008), 

the film he made after Woman on the Beach, small, inexplicable coincidences abound, both 

within the events of the film’s narrative and the rhythms of Hong’s mise-en-scène. A wounded 

bird Seong-nam accidentally saves from falling to its death finds its uncanny echo in a songbird 

trapped in the terminal of Charles de Gaulle airport; a trail of water streaming around a pile of 

dog feces as it runs down to a gutter will later be mirrored when Seong-nam aimlessly sends a 

paper boat off on its own meandering path to the gutter; and eventually one woman’s 

pregnancy becomes doubled by another’s, the fact that one turns out to be a made-up lie 

implicitly haunting the other one. Like that space “open beyond the broken structure,” these 

small and – narratively speaking – ultimately unimportant oddities seem suggestive of the fact 

that reality has some kind of design or rhythm of its own, one whose machinations remain 

beyond Seong-nam’s grasp. While he goes about imposing his needs and desires on all the 

women around him, they each in turn end up having their own intractable realities and motives 

independent of what he needs them for.  Just as the small things of reality resist our wish for 

meaning-giving patterns, people, similarly, are never an exact mirror image of our libidinal 

projections and emotional needs, but exist with their own self-contained realities. 

 “It seems to me that reality can only appear between the cracks of discrete, 

hypothetic, uncertain elements,” Hong explains in an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon. “I 

never try to share a truth, but only approximations” (Frodon, 2003). In contrast to Hong’s more 

frequently-cited statements mentioned earlier, where reality, dream, and imagination are all 

granted the same quality of importance, here he suggests that there is indeed some kind of 



 

 

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256 

objective, true reality beyond our mental projections, but it’s one that remains elusively out of 

grasp, glimmers of something true appearing through the cracks of how our minds arrange and 

narrativize the things and people around us. Jacques Aumont, building on Clément Rosset’s La 

Réel: Traité de l’idiotie (1977) and Roland Barthes’s famed theory of the photographic 

“punctum” from Camera Lucida (1980), has identified this kind of reality in Hong’s films as 

“idiotic,” in the sense that it’s often stupidly without reason, and etymologically in the sense 

that it betrays itself as so many singular, “idiomatic” fragments. This idiotic reality both resists 

explanation while at the same time indicates “that which is typical of someone, of a singular 

being, that which makes someone different from all others and which is ineffable almost by 

definition” (Aumont, 2017). Aumont finds this idiotic reality in the little details that don’t 

necessarily matter to a film’s narrative or semiological machinery, like these paired birds in 

Night and Day that become free-floating signifiers of whatever either Seong-nam or the film’s 

viewers need or want them to be. Like Hong’s open space beyond our meaning-giving 

structures that he finds coincidences point to, these idiotic realities open Hong’s films “up to 

something unknown, which can have no other name than the real, if by the real we mean that 

which we will never know because we are too busy dressing it in an imaginary reality” (2017, 

emphases Aumont’s). However, Hong’s films consistently suggest that this real that exists 

outside our own desires and narrative constructions can indeed by known and grasped, if we 

could only take the time and the work to look at what’s right there in front of us, like Mori in 

Hill of Freedom finding happiness by getting lost in a flower. And what we can do with 

flowers, we might be able to do with other people as well. 

 

 



 

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Searching for “the real thing” 

Indeed, in Woman on the Beach, while Jung-rae goes on to spend the rest of the day 

avoiding writing about this quasi-Borgesian secret of all things, some immaterial essence that 

binds everything together and would explain its mysterious links and doubles and coincidences, 

Mun-suk repeatedly references what she calls “the real thing.” First, in a rambling discussion of 

both her dissatisfaction with her physical appearance and her emotional loneliness, she comes 

to the conclusion that “we should earn the real thing without any help from others.” She 

doesn’t explain exactly what this “real thing” is for her, but she laments the fact that she still 

looks for it in other people (“I know I shouldn’t expect it of them”). Notably, she quickly 

comes to realize her own disappointment in Jung-rae, seeing up-close the vast gulf between her 

ideas of him, largely based on his films she’s seen and his planned film’s emotional 

intelligence, and the reality of his own bumbling, drunken insecurities and hang-ups: “You’re 

different from your films. Sorry, but you’re actually just another Korean man.”  

Of course, old habits die hard in Hong’s world, and she still ends up with him later in 

the night for a clandestine rendezvous on the beach, bristling with seductive possibility while 

they leave Chang-wook back at the hotel. Gazing up into the nighttime sky, uncontaminated by 

the city’s light, she marvels at the beauty of the universe, and suggests that humans have some 

fundamental moral responsibility to appreciate that beauty: “If we’re not conscious of it, it’s 

meaningless, isn’t it? If we occasionally look into space and think about it, then the universe 

will be less lonely.” It’s a kind of esse est percipi associated with Bishop Berkeley’s anti-

idealism, suggesting that nothing exists unless there’s someone to think about it. But then, 

echoing her earlier mention of “the real thing,” she goes on to muse, “The really real thing that 

I have absolute faith in is the stars.”  



 

 

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Figure 1. Mun-suk pondering the stars' "real thing," while Jung-rae remains stuck in his seductive games. 

 

Whatever her implicit theory of “the real thing” might turn out to be, she suggests that, one the 

hand, it lies in the stars’ eternal thereness, while on the other, it’s something she wants to 

discover in her own person, without any assistance from others or without having to understand 

herself in relation (romantic, sexual, or otherwise). Jung-rae, meanwhile, believes “a secret to 

the world” lies in the relations between things and people, the way nothing really is on its own, 

but only comes to matter until it’s turned into a part of some plot or narrative (there’s 

something of the paranoid apophenic about Hong’s typical protagonist, convinced of plots and 

conspiracies that probably don’t actually exist). 

The next day, after deciding the trip wasn’t as conducive to writing as he thought, the 

three head back to Seoul, with Jung-rae promising Mun-suk that he’ll be in touch once he 

clears his head. But just two days later, he’s back at Shinduri, though this time on his own and 

ready to get to work. His second trip, notably, begins with him in an unexpected moment of 

something like prayer, supplicating before a grove of three trees and crying for help, as if 



 

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desperate for the creative spark that’s been eluding him. As Hong remarks of this seemingly 

discordant scene: “The sudden feeling of loneliness overwhelms him when he returns to the 

beach all by himself. Then he sees these three trees he feels mystical about and he kowtows on 

his knees. And he spills everything out” (Huh 84). Whether he realizes it or not, perhaps he’s 

found that “real thing” Mun-suk described, an almost “mystical” moment of recognition that 

these three trees stand there apart from him both with their own inextricable thereness and their 

own quiet beauty. If it is a “mystical” moment as Hong describes, then it’s a mysticism of the 

most ordinary, quotidian kind, like Mori’s happiness with a flower. The scene, imbued with 

melancholy as it is, finds its graceful echo eleven years later, in The Day After (2017). In that 

film, publisher Bong-wan and his new assistant Areum have their own discussion about the 

nature of reality, Areum doubting in Wittgensteinian fashion whether what we can’t describe 

can be said to actually be real: “If reality is unknowable, then it must not exist.” “Words can’t 

describe it,” Bong-wan counters, “but we can feel it.” 

 

And after the pair’s complicated misunderstandings over the course of her first day on 

the job, the result of so many mistaken and preconceived ideas of who people are assumed to 

be rather then who they actually are, Areum’s left alone, riding home in a cab as the snow starts 

faintly falling over Seoul.  



 

 

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Figure 2. Areum's moment of grace in The Day After. 

“It’s such a blessing,” she muses. Leaning her head out the window, her face graced by passing 

lights and falling flurries, we even hear her pray to God in voiceover narration, as if she finds 

divinity in all this beautiful, ordinary reality. She can’t describe in words why it’s so 

meaningful, but she can certainly feel it. “Whatever can be defined, it is bullshit,” Hong bluntly 

explains to Huh (2007, p. 80). In what we might call an “immanent transcendence” that 

characterizes the meaningfulness of reality in Hong’s cinema, Hong suggests the failure of his 

characters like Jung-rae, who search for explanatory patterns and systems to be imposed from 

above. Instead, as Areum comes to realize in her own exquisite moment of grace, and as Mun-

suk sees in the stars above and seeks to find in herself, all reality’s accidental, messy, and 

frequently beautiful people and things are already meaningful enough before we go looking for 

definitions and explanations.  

Jung-rae proves himself capable of such an encounter with reality, seeing it so clearly 

that it becomes a kind of earthbound sacred experience, during his supplication before the trees, 

but all he can do is ask it for help rather than celebrate it, as Areum does, for what it is. After 



 

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his moment of tearful grace, he even goes so far as to call Mun-suk, leaving her a rambling 

voicemail in which he decries the fact that “there are so many idiots who take life for granted.” 

And yet, when it comes to other people, and women especially, he consistently remains blinded 

by his expectation of, or hope in, that “very thin string that links everything” he describes 

looking for in “About Miracles,” resulting in his inability to resist imposing narratives and 

patterns on his own experience. So, while Woman on the Beach has clearly progressed forward 

linearly, it’s as if Jung-rae remains determined to turn his own experience into a more 

conventional Hong film (and thus given a less conventional structure, or just any at all). During 

his second trip, after he meets two young women traveling in Shinduri together (two women 

we had seen briefly walking past him during the first trip), he becomes convinced that one of 

them, Sun-hee, resembles Mun-suk (even asking a confused restaurant owner to verify his 

vision). He quickly decides to ask to interview her, claiming she resembles a character in the 

film he’s trying to write. Jung-rae’s gambit has led Tony McKibbin to aptly describe Woman 

on the Beach as “Vertigo by other means” (McKibbin, 2013), while it also echoes A Tale of 

Cinema, in which Tong-su tried to transform his own haphazard experience into the film he’d 

seen. Grilling her at first about her attitude toward dogs and her parents, echoing moments he 

shared with Moon-suk, he soon turns to weightier matters, with Sun-hee’s answers initially 

suggesting he’s found in her a kind of idealized version of her quasi-double, the woman who 

Mun-suk wanted to be: “What do you believe in?” “Myself,” she responds. “I’m not perfect, 

but it’s still me. It’s up to me to improve myself.” Her answer to the next question, though, 

throws a wrench into the operation: “Do you like stars, up in the sky?” “I’ve never really 

thought about them.” A repetition, but an imperfect one; a double who refuses to totally 

coincide with her original. Sun-hee has found what Mun-suk yearns to find, the comfort of self-

understanding and thus self-acceptance, knowing exactly who she is and able to live her life 



 

 

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with the kind of clarity that comes with such self-possession; and yet she sees no link between 

her self’s “real thing” and the stars in the sky. And Jung-rae, like so many of Hong’s 

protagonists before and after, is still left only with so many emotional idealizations and 

libidinal projections.2    

The inevitable complications ensue, of course, once Mun-suk also returns to Shinduri 

for her own private reasons, and her reality runs up against Jung-rae’s attempt to manufacture 

his reality in the form of Sun-hee (“I do not really see her as a woman at all,” he says in his 

attempt to assuage Min-suk’s jealousy). The two ultimately confront the messy love affair 

they’ve inaugurated, though he’s unable to get past the idea of her having slept with foreign 

men in the past (and especially the myths regarding foreign men’s “dick size”). Attempting to 

convince himself that her sexual past hardly matters when she’s right here in front of him in a 

situation that that’s very real, he suddenly mounts an elaborate argument against being so in 

thrall to subjective images of other people: “Your actions now and my obsession with purity 

are all images. We’re repeating images imprinted on us by others.” He goes on to draw a 

diagram to attempt to illustrate his convoluted point, coopting her own language from their first 

visit to town. “The real thing,” he suggests, while drawing a messy blob, “constantly changes 

and has infinite curves.” But our problems arise when we focus too much on only specific 

points of the blob, like the face of a lover, or a specific body part. “Then, there is an image that 

recurs.”  



 

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Figure 3. Jung-rae's attempt to diagram our image-making tendencies. 

Rather than seeing the thing itself – such as Mun-suk – he’s left only seeing his worst fears and 

emotional projections of it, in this case one small detail of her sexual past. And so he adds more 

points to that blob, ones that are a part of it but wholly unrelated to his image built of jealousy 

derived from only a few isolated parts: “Your happy face after those spicy rice cakes. And here 

is your nice face worrying about a sick friend.” Connecting ever more points with one another, 

we get a more elaborate shape than jealousy’s small one, until “we can overcome this 

stereotypical and evil image.” The resulting shape may still not be “the real thing,” but it may 

be the closest approximation we can get. “That’s a really good way to look at it,” she gushes in 

the moment. But once she talks to Sun-hee, and gets a few more of the facts of the matter, she 

becomes haunted by her own image, of Jung-rae and her almost-double having sex while she 

waits outside their door, and then furtively stepping over her sleeping body the morning after 

(“I thought I was dreaming, but it was real”). Confronting Jung-rae with her own image, one 

very much grounded in “the real thing” of their relationship in the present, rather than 

constructed guesses at a past that’s no longer here, she sends him into a fit of self-righteous 

indignation: “Don’t you remember? I told you how hard it is to fight with images!” And rather 



 

 

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than admiration for his intellectual game, Min-suk instead sees it as the cheap sophistry it really 

is: “So just give me the facts. Not your bullshit philosophy.”3 

And ultimately, as Jung-rae silently rushes back to Seoul once his two-page-long script 

is jotted off in a few hours, Mun-suk’s left alone in Shinduri, finally having learnt what “the 

real thing” is and where it lies. As with the political function of the zoom as analyzed by 

Raymond, stylistically diagnosing Jung-rae’s “attraction-repulsion dynamic” with Mun-suk’s 

previous sexual experiences and his “inability to confront and deal with erotic desire” (26), 

seeing him more clearly than he can see himself, Mun-suk has ultimately learned to wrest 

control of herself away from the filmmaker’s imposed narrative. “I hope I don’t offend you,” 

she tells the director in one last phone call, “but I don’t respect Korean men too much.”  

 

 

Figure 4. Mun-suk on the beach alone, just "the real thing" itself. 

 

 



 

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Liberated from Jung-rae’s construction of reality, she’s left only with the fact of her 

own reality, with the self-knowledge of existing outside of relations both crudely sexual and 

emotionally constructed. Recalling Hong’s claim that he makes “films based on structures that 

I have thought up" rather than reality, in a strange metatextual twist to a film that’s otherwise 

resisted such tricks, it’s as if Mun-suk hasn’t just resisted the directorial control of Jung-rae, 

but she’s also asserted the importance of her own reality against Hong’s own interest in the 

structures his men use to organize and make sense of it. Jung-rae’s own project, that “About 

Miracles” described earlier, exists as a wish for some cosmic explanation, an insistence that all 

life’s messy, accidental things are part of some meaningful narrative. And when he fails to find 

it, he just invents his own version of the stability it would promise, the way he turns women 

into who he thinks they are or needs them to be instead of seeing them as they are.  

I. Ways of avoiding reality in Hong’s cinema 

This tendency, inherited from A Tale of Cinema, abounds in the films that follow 

Woman on the Beach. It’s as if Hong has identified some distinctively masculine narrativizing 

impulse, a determination to make all of life’s messy, aleatory stuff explicable or at least 

bearable by imposing upon it some kind of story that would organize everything and thus make 

meaning out of it. In The Day He Arrives (2011), for instance, Seong-jin argues against the 

existence of coincidence, echoing Jung-rae’s own diagram: “Random things happen for no 

reason in our lives. We choose a few and form a line of thought.” He knows, like Seong-nam 

suspected in Night and Day, that these ghostly doublings don’t really mean anything but just 

are, but rather than find the meaningfulness of what seems to have none, he instead just invents 

his own. Hong’s women, on the other hand, do the hard work of actually looking at what’s in 

front of them, what’s undeniably here and very real without it having to be part of some vast 

narrative of which his male characters always think they must be the protagonist. “Why can’t 



 

 

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people see the good things in front of them?” Mihye wonders in the short film List (2011), 

learning to abandon her overly ambitious to-do list as she chooses instead to just let each day 

happen on its own and decide on her own terms what matters about it and what it means. Or as 

Claire explains of her “vaguely magical” instrument in Claire’s Camera (2017), “the only way 

to change things is by looking at them slowly.”4 It’s a way of seeing and a way of being that 

finds perhaps its most powerful culmination in Areum’s quiet observer in Grass (2018), not 

having to impose any invented stories on all the lives she overhears, because all this human 

messiness is meaningful and important enough on its own. The quartet of stories she observes 

are certainly not tidy ones, and they find neither resolution nor insight, but she still achieves a 

kind of autumnal compassion toward all this real and ordinary folly. “I envy you two, you 

insignificant things. You’ll be dead someday,” she ultimately muses of one especially volatile 

couple after she’d earlier ruthlessly judged their behavior. “Enjoy yourselves.” It may all be 

insignificant and ephemeral, but it’s also the only life we’re going to get; so surely it must 

matter, in and of itself. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than itself because it simply is. 

Areum’s compassionate gaze ultimately suggests a spiritual significance to Mun-suk’s 

solitary climax on the beach, finding that “the real thing” can be both her life as it is and the 

beauty lying in the cosmic vastness of the nighttime sky. This is all very real, and it’s 

happening, and it’s simply her life, without having to be part of something imposed on it from 

without. Having sworn off any tendency to manufacture duplicates and repetitions (“Should I 

try to find someone here who resembles you?” she jokingly asks Jung-rae on the phone. “Don’t 

worry. I won’t”), just herself alone is also enough. She earlier thought that the stars’ reality 

needed to be seen to become meaningful, but maybe remaining unseen doesn’t have to mean 

loneliness or meaninglessness after all; especially when being seen in Hong’s world more often 



 

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than not entails being mis-seen, turned into projection and almost-double. Shinduri has been 

left mostly emptied out during the off-season, but it’s not winter yet and no snow falls from the 

sky as it does for Areum’s moment of grace in The Day After, but just a small, unexpected 

moment of kindness from two strangers can also be enough. When her car gets stuck in the 

sand as she’s about to leave Shinduri behind, two men rush over to help her out, refusing her 

insistence on repaying them. Like the stars, this too is really real, a moment without a narrative, 

a human encounter without an emotionally transactional framework. It may be idiotic, in 

Aumont’s sense, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be as beautiful as a flower or a snowfall. 

Explaining the ending, Hong describes how we wanted “Mun-suk to experience a sincere 

kindness from a total stranger. Although it may not solve everything for her, it would 

encourage her to feel the sweetness of life” (Huh, 2007, p. 87).5 It may not solve anything 

larger than this moment’s small challenge, and it certainly doesn’t mean much of anything for 

her life back in Seoul as a whole, but despite its smallness, or maybe even because of its 

smallness, the human encounter becomes something overwhelmingly real. It’s that “something 

like a soul” Jung-rae pondered in “About Miracles,” but it’s material rather than ethereal, 

immanent rather than transcendent. And by virtue of seeing it, she also sees herself as a part of 

it all. Hong and all his men look to structures rather than reality, while he’s slyly let his women 

hold the secret all the men use art to fumble toward; comfortably inhabiting what actually is, as 

opposed to what they might wish it to be. He believed this soul’s string “is nothing bodily,” but 

is what ties these otherwise discrete material things – a person, the sound of a bar of music, a 

moment of kindness – together. Mun-suk, on other hand, realizes it’s very much bodily, that 

it’s her and Jung-rae, and these two strangers on the beach and Sun-hee and Chang-wook as 

well; each here, mattering in and of themselves before they have to mean anything for one 

another. Jung-rae wanted to make a film “about miracles,” and Hong’s great joke ends up that 



 

 

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they’re right here, all the time; they need no elsewhere to find their significance. And so, in a 

climactic triangulation mimicking the more complicated ones preceding it, Mun-suk gets to 

drive off joyously on her own, with the knowledge that she’s real enough, as real even as the 

stars. It took two men to help her get unstuck, though they notably expect nothing in return; 

and once free she can go wherever she wants, while they stay behind with their car still stuck in 

the sand. 

Speaking with Christopher Small, Hong again makes his oft-repeated claim that “there 

is no such thing as reality:” “We are bound to feel certain things by our circumstances. We 

work and move around, not really believing in things, just automatically doing them and 

thinking them based on this false conception of reality.” But a few moments later, he goes on to 

muse on the way reality, not in the sense of some secret order but rather reality in its idiotic 

thereness, can indeed become present to us: “Sometimes, when come across, say, a poetic 

moment in life, you see things differently from just an everyday setting. You can discover 

something totally different. You can feel it, but this feeling goes away quickly and you return 

to that normal state” (Small, 2017). If those “false conceptions of reality” largely dominate all 

the perceptual and ethical failings of Hong’s men like Jung-rae, only at moments dimly able to 

awaken their irrealities, but never for long enough, then it’s this attentiveness to these “poetic 

moment[s] in life,” everything that can help us “discover something totally different” that 

characterizes Mun-suk’s radiant smile during her moment of reality on the beach. Such 

moments, notably, mark a key correspondence between Hong’s cinema and that of a filmmaker 

to whom he's frequently compared, Éric Rohmer. Both filmmakers, beyond their myriad 

stylistic and thematic affinities, embrace chance and the accidental, welcome an attentiveness 



 

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to moments of idiotic reality in its simple thereness, and ultimately, we might even say, choose 

always to believe in the possibility of those miracles that consistently eluded Jung-rae. 

  

Éric Rohmer’s art of chance and awareness  

It’s become something of a critical commonplace to describe Hong’s very talkative 

cinema as having its closest affinity to that of Rohmer. James Quandt suggests the reasons for 

the comparisons lie in the fact that Hong’s “ineffectual characters seem to talk more than act, 

deceive themselves and others, misinterpret motives and events, and take various psychological 

byways to defer their future” (Quandt, 2007).6 Greg Gerke, similarly, writes that “like Rohmer, 

Hong wants to eviscerate the male ego,” while at the same time, both are “romantics who 

capture the improvisatory moments in life, the coveted and the delusional love-at-first-sight 

moments” (Gerke, 2019).7 And if their career’s myriad resemblances can find elective 

affinities in specific films, then this mutual interest in the male ego’s diagnosis and evisceration 

would mostly clearly link Hong’s first six films with the French filmmaker’s six Contes 

morales made from 1963 to 1972, while Woman on the Beach’s newfound feminine-led 

approach to “the real thing” would surely make it Hong’s Le Rayon vert (1986).8 Each film, in 

staging one woman’s seaside discovery of a moment of true feeling, might be said to be “about 

miracles” in a way that Jung-rae’s fumbling search for networks and correspondences would 

never be able to achieve. 

 Like Woman on the Beach, The Green Ray begins in a banal urban office; indeed, 

Rohmer’s own office, as the film was made largely intimately and inexpensively, built on 

improvisation and a small, bare-bones crew, with the friends and family of star and co-creator 

Marie Rivière playing themselves.9 Delphine, one of the office’s secretaries, just receives the 

news that her plans for a summer holiday in Greece have been cancelled by her friends, though 



 

 

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the brightly colored tulips on her skirt in the opening shot already indicate some possibility of 

hope amid the disappointment, a belief in beauty amid the office’s clinical drabness. And 

indeed, as Rohmer invites us to live with her so intimately as she sets about to salvage her 

summer – she appears in nearly every frame of the film, often pinioned by these subtle zooms 

that will come to characterize Hong’s own probing eye – it’s her hope and belief that will come 

to define her worldview and spirit, a persistent stance of openness to the new and the 

unexpected, maybe even the possibility of miracles.  

When it comes to how she makes plans for her future, whether summer holidays or 

romantic possibilities (we eventually learn that she ended things with her fiancé two years 

earlier, despite the fact that she repeatedly feels compelled to lie about this), Delphine notably 

rejects the power of astrology and tarot cards to map out the story of her life, professing instead 

a faith in the accidental. Early on, she wanders past a bright green astrologer’s advertisement 

posted on the street, promising to “rediscover contact with yourself and others.” She notably 

doesn’t take down the number, insisting later in conversation with her friends that she places 

little faith in astrology, tarot cards, or the stars.  



 

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Figure 5. Delphine's private superstitions, finding significance not in the séance's promise but in the accidental fact of 

its advertisement's greenness. 

 

When her friend Manuella suggests using a séance “to find a man” for her and Delphine 

demurs, she’s asked whether she believes in anything at all. “I believe in,” she struggles to 

articulate, “things that just crop up out of nowhere in life, that just happen by themselves, like 

matters of the heart.” As she goes on to elaborate when her friends, in thrall to their magazine 

horoscopes and astrological readings, press her further: 

 

I believe in personal superstitions. I do believe in things like playing cards you find in 

the street… Sometimes, when I least expect it, I’m just walking along and I find a card. 

It always means something. Like on the way to my sister’s, I found a queen of spades. 

The queen of spades is bad luck… I was attracted to it. What’s more, the card was 

green. Which is weird because I had a friend who is a medium. He told me green would 

be my color of the year. It’s strange, because since then, and maybe I’m just noticing it 



 

 

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now, I keep finding little green things. So, on the way to my sister’s, I spotted a little 

green card. Next to a green lamppost, and I was dressed in green. 

 

 Neither the card’s signification according to some widely known system of good-or-bad 

fortune nor the astrologer’s promise of star-assigned connection matters to Delphine, only the 

more personal superstitious logic whereby the greenness of both the card and the advertising 

leaflet become the site of their meaningfulness. And while that greenness, of course, points to 

the miraculous flash of the green ray that Delphine will witness at film’s end, it also suggests 

just what Delphine hopes for in placing her faith in these “things that crop up out of nowhere in 

life.” She points out the strangeness of the medium’s prediction becoming correct, while in a 

pointed aside she also acknowledges that it might just be a matter of her simply noticing now 

what was all along there to see. Greenness, after all, is there all around, and one’s ordinary days 

are more likely than not filled with little green objects; but the world’s abundance of random 

greenness only becomes significant, only becomes worth caring about, when one chooses to 

notice it, when one decides it’s significant for oneself and for oneself alone.  

Resisting pre-packaged and universally applicable significatory systems the same way 

she rejects her friend Béatrice’s suggestion of a group holiday program, Delphine holds out 

hope, as Mun-suk holds out up, that she and her life – her actual experience, however sad and 

ordinary it may be – is meaningful on its own, without having to be given meaning from 

without. As Tony McKibbin has argued, all Delphine’s moments of green throughout the film 

even before the climax come to “represent a way of not interpreting the world and 

universalizing the interpretation, but intuiting the world and singularizing the interpretation” 

(McKibbin, 2010). She places her faith in the accidental and the unanticipated, not because 



 

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they might point to some larger meaning-giving system, but because the accidental and the 

unanticipated is mostly all that ordinary experience gives, and she wants her ordinary 

experience to be valuable enough on its own.  

While Jung-rae is similarly haunted by the accidental, for him its rearing its head is 

always the sign of some sinister plot; the thing means nothing in and of itself, and no 

coincidence or repetition matters until he can invent a plot that explains it. Delphine, on the 

other hand, like Mun-suk, thinks all these little accidents (“personal superstitions,” “like 

playing cards you find in the street”) are all more than enough, even if they don’t necessarily 

mean anything. “It’s a question of awareness,” she later explains to an incredulous group of 

meat-eaters about her vegetarianism. “You should never stop caring!” Paying attention is 

Delphine’s guiding principle in life, whether regarding her idiosyncratic eating habits (“It’s all 

very mystical”) or her newfound interest in noticing the green that’s always been there, but also 

in how she interacts with others around her, and tries to find and articulate her own value in the 

midst of so many intersubjective misunderstandings and mistranslations. She dreams not of 

setting out to find a man to ease her lovelorn loneliness, like the dreary roundelays of date-by-

numbers promised by Berénice’s suggestion of a group holiday, but she hopes simply to 

stumble into love. Even the very idea of planning any summer holiday at all ends up becoming 

something like a false promise, looking for some new experience that she’s had to manufacture 

the possibility of ahead of time, instead of simply waiting for or being able to wander into 

according to a more organic logic. Ewa Mazierska has most thoroughly explored this 

disenchantment of the vacation throughout Rohmer’s holiday-heavy oeuvre, distinguishing 

between the traveler who’s “guided by some personal quest” as opposed to the “published 

guide” of the tourist (2002, p. 226). And ultimately, she suggests, Rohmer’s world is one in 

which “there are no intrinsically good or bad locations for a holiday,” since what she terms 



 

 

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“spiritual centres,” sites where “one’s emotional and intellectual requirements are fulfilled” 

(Mazierska, 2002, p. 242) can ultimately be found anywhere, wherever one arrives at the 

feeling of finally feeling at home with and in themselves.10 

Delphine may spend the film trying to salvage her plans for summer holiday, but that’s 

only as a means to ultimately put to the test her belief in salvaging experience itself; that 

meaning doesn’t reside only in the pre-planned, the exceptional, or the sought-after, but in the 

realm of ordinary actual experience itself as it naturally happens. Like choosing to find 

significance in the green that’s always been there and suddenly finding small moments of 

private meaning everywhere you go, or recalling Hong’s Mori in Hill of Freedom, finding 

happiness not in the superimposed frameworks and cognitive meta-narratives with which we 

organize our experience but simply in getting lost gazing at a flower. Delphine’s faith in chance 

can ultimately be read, much like Hong’s own belief in finding “the space that is open beyond 

the broken structure,” as an ethical stance characterized by perpetual openness, as opposed to 

how the friends and family around her are always trying to impose their logic on her. Béatrice, 

for instance, during the long conversation in the Paris garden that winds toward Delphine’s 

idiosyncratic belief system, insists that Delphine must be lonely and thus fundamentally 

lacking, but only according to the logic of loneliness that Béatrice knows. “You can’t go on 

feeling lonely forever. You can’t live on your own forever. Look at you, you’re sad,” the well-

intentioned friend insists, to which Delphine can only respond, “I’m not sad.” “Look, all is 

fine,” she goes on to elaborate. “Maybe I’m a bit lonely at the moment. But it’s not as if I’m 

completely on my own. I have someone in my life, even if I’m not seeing him just now. So, 

you don’t know what you’re saying.” While of course Delphine is obfuscating the truth here 

about her broken-off engagement with Jean-Pierre, if we can indeed take her words at face-



 

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value as some truthful expression of her worldview, she’s also suggesting a private conception 

of human relations and being with other people. Béatrice places the be-all-and-end-all of 

human plenitude and satisfaction on the socially sanctioned institution of the romantic 

relationship, while Delphine insists (quite correctly) that even without a romantic partner, she 

still has “someone” in her life, even spectrally, and surely that must matter enough to mean that 

she’s not entirely on her own.  

When Manuella ironically asks whether Delphine’s “going to sit around waiting for 

Prince Charming,” the answer, of course, is an emphatic yes, because to try self-consciously to 

seek him out would go against all the principles she’s used to define her life and its value. As 

opposed to Hong’s Jung-rae, who, aside from his moment of grace with the grove of three 

trees, is always already going to see exactly what he wants or needs reality to be, Delphine 

insists on the value of trying to discover reality as it is, without actively searching for one thing 

in particular. Of course, waiting for things that actually might matter to crop up becomes an 

invitation for perpetual disappointment, but Delphine believes, as Rohmer does, that all the 

disappointment in the world is worth it for those moments when openness – toward the new, 

the unexpected, the aleatory, the marvelous – ends up actually rewarded. What looks like 

passivity to frustrated observers such as Béatrice and Lena is actually more like a position of 

attentiveness and openness, what McKibbin has identified as Rohmer’s belief, inherited from a 

Stoic tradition stretching from Epictetus to Kierkegaard, that “we mustn’t over-determine our 

lives; if anything we have to un-determine them, create holes in their expected flow, gaps in 

cause and effect. Above all else, perhaps, we need to create an evolving subjectivity that will 

allow us to be open to another’s subjectivity” (McKibbin, 2010). And where one creates 

“holes” in the flow of their lives, without pre-arranged networks of meaning or interpretations 



 

 

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or plans, one might indeed end up finding miracles, if only in the unanticipated arrival of 

another person as open to your own subjectivity as you are to theirs. 

 

Rohmer and the ethics of openness 

After her failed attempts at planned holidays in Cherbourg and the Alps, too lonely 

surrounded by kind strangers in the former and too uninspired by the obvious grandeur of the 

latter’s offerings (not to mention too haunted by the specter of bad romantic memories, 

planning to stay there in the vacation apartment still owned by her ex-fiancé, Jean-Pierre), and 

still too stranded and bereft in an emptied-out Paris, she ultimately ends up in Biarritz thanks to 

a serendipitous encounter with an old friend, offering her brother-in-law’s unused apartment. 

Biarritz may be the pre-planning tourist’s summer destination par excellence, but for Delphine 

it emerges as a happy accident, and thus one worth pursuing, no matter the crowd sizes she 

must know she’ll find there. Her aleatory hopes, though, for the bustling resort town at first 

appear to be yet another disappointment, with a long, dreary sequence marking her arrival as a 

stranger in yet another strange land, alone in the vast crowds overtaking the beach. The sense 

of compounded loneliness reaches its apex when, in one of the most touching of the film’s 

sequences, wandering around her friend’s brother-in-law’s apartment in Biarritz, she finds 

herself compelled to hide all the strangers’ family photos away in drawers, as if she can’t bear 

the reminder of even other people’s happy memories. “I’m not stubborn, life is stubborn,” she 

had earlier told her friends back in Paris, and in Biarritz she seems to have found more of 

reality’s intractability, its silent refusal to offer what she hopes for and its intractable stinginess 

regarding the surprise of things that leap up from nowhere, moments of reality surprising 

enough to stir the heart. 



 

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  Delphine’s final trip turns into even more of a blunder once she starts spending time 

with fellow solitary traveler Lena, whose cheerful openness both seems to bring Delphine out 

of her shell while also reinforcing just how little there is for her worth emerging for. Sharing 

drinks after a day at the beach, the Swede presses Delphine on her attitudes toward men, asking 

how she can tell whether she likes a guy when she first sees him. Stressing once again her 

stance of expectant waiting for life’s possibilities, a stance that can look a lot like passivity to 

those who doubt her, Delphine pensively reflects that she’s “not very proactive:” “I look at 

people, but I never make any determined steps to find someone or something.” But when Lena 

counters by asking whether she expects people to come to her, Delphine tries to explain that 

that isn’t what she meant at all, though she struggles to put into words what it is she does mean. 

“I’m very open to people,” she eventually elaborates. “I feel how they are. I’m receptive. And I 

listen. I’m open toward people.” Lena, on the other hand, suggests how little such openness and 

receptivity will get you, but only according to her own theory regarding how little people can 

be trusted, a theory Delphine emphatically rejects. In the absence of trust, Lena explains her 

own attitudes toward the dating game, the ways she “play[s]” with people: “To find the right 

person, someone who is good, you shouldn’t show your feelings straightaway… I live my life. 

I have fun. And I see how others react. Then I decide: Is it good, or is it bad? It’s like a card 

game. You shouldn’t give away what you have in your hand.” For Delphine’s naked sincerity, 

not to mention her belief in the possibility of stumbling into romance as a moment of mutually 

encountered openness, such mechanistic game-playing is incomprehensible. So quietly 

receptive, employing that patient sort of compassionate gaze Areum finds at the end of Grass, 

may consistently end up getting her so little in return, but so passionate are her practically 

Levinasian beliefs in the idea of a truly soulful encounter with another person, that she couldn’t 

imagine deigning to play anything resembling Lena’s game. 



 

 

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Figure 6. Delphine's tears in Biarritz, waiting for a miracle and getting instead only a tourist's holiday. 

  

Such game-playing ends up, like Jung-rae’s own misguided attempt to mold Sun-hee’s 

reality into Mun-suk’s model in Woman on the Beach, turning people into characters or pawns, 

if not totally reifying them into props on the stage of one’s emotional and romantic life. While 

for Delphine, on other hand, as with her larger philosophy on the meaning of ordinary 

experience, other people must be real if anything like a meaningful matter of the heart is going 

to happen. As McKibbin writes, for Delphine, “love isn’t a game we play or a social 

transaction fulfilled, but a belief system set in motion” (McKibbin, 2010). Love needs to arrive 

like a playing card in the street or an epiphanic flash at sunset, not anything that means 

according to some already existing meaning-giving system but only in and of itself, wholly on 

its own terms. If Delphine’s stance is, as I have repeatedly mentioned, an ethical one, then it is 

indeed a Levinasian ethics committed to the otherness of the other; seeing other people not 



 

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with the violence of objectification, or the implicit definitions and models of romantic 

expectations, but with the powerlessness and responsibility of openness, paying attention 

because you understand that there’s a world worth paying attention to. 

 Otherness, for Levinas, famously reveals itself in the naked, pre-signifying presence 

of the face; an eruption of the other within the world of the same that doesn’t signify any 

meaning in particular but simply announces the significance of the fact that it is. “The absolute 

nakedness of a face,” he writes, “the absolutely defenseless face, without covering, cloth or 

mask, is what opposed my power over it, my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way, with 

an opposition which is opposition in itself” (Levinas, 1987, p. 21). Perception, then, can be 

neither an act of ownership nor objectification, but a conversational encounter, a relation that’s 

mutual rather than hierarchical.  

The face, for Levinas, as a kind of signifying force without any specific significant 

context, “is not that to which I oppose myself, but what is opposed to me. It is an opposition 

inscribed in its presence before me. It does not at all follow my intervention” (Levinas, 1987, p. 

19). Always arriving without warning or already imposed definition, but also arising without 

reference to one’s own self-conceptions and conceptual frameworks, it arrives as the 

welcoming presence of complete otherness. It arrives, indeed, as something like a miracle, like 

those improbable coincidences Hong marveled at, the ones that open up the world-organizing 

(and world-obfuscating) structures that otherwise occupy our minds, and the ones that so 

befuddled Jung-rae in his own planned film; all those things that, as Delphine cherishes, “just 

crop out of nowhere in life.” Like Levinas’s face, these ordinary miracles are eruptions within 

our expected reality, while still remaining wholly immanent within that reality, a 

transcendence-within-immanence. To encounter reality in a way that wouldn’t “subject it to 

tyranny,” for Levinas, is to be put “in contact with a being that is not simply uncovered, but 



 

 

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280 

divested of its form, of its categories, a being becoming naked, an unqualified substance 

breaking through its form and presenting its face” (Levinas, 1987, p. 20). It’s perhaps, 

ultimately, like Moon-suk finding “the real thing” in the stars, or the possibility that Jung-rae 

could ever see Moon-suk without the distorting images he’s already built in his mind, or the 

way Delphine welcomes all these unanticipated flashes of green.  

The existence of the miraculous within the material world of the everyday notably 

occupied Rohmer during his early years as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. Writing on 

Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954), for instance, in an article titled “The Land of the 

Miracles,” Rohmer is especially preoccupied with the seemingly unmotivated miracle of Alex 

and Katherine’s reignited love for one another as the get swept up in the San Gennaro festival 

in Naples: “If the film succeeds – logically, you could say – through a miracle, it is because 

that miracle was in the order of things whose order, in the end, depends on a miracle” (Rohmer, 

1986, p. 207). If the ordinary order of things, Rohmer’s gnomic pronouncement suggests, is 

one in which love fades and the bickering couple was doomed to grow ever further apart until 

nothing remained to tether them to one another at all, then that order of things is only apparent 

rather than actual, much like Hong Sang-soo’s pronouncements earlier regarding the falsely 

constructed realities that we go around imposing on the world and calling “the real thing.” 

What seemed to be the inexorable order of things, ultimately, precisely depends on its own 

flimsiness, and the inherent possibility of its own disruption. Some, like Lena and Béatrice in 

Le Rayon vert, or Jung-rae in Woman in the Beach, are happy never to face the possibility of 

such a disruption; they’ve decided what the world means to them and the categories they’ll use 

to organize its things and its people, and reality then always appears to be the very thing they 

already assumed it would be. Love is never much more than a game, emotional completion can 



 

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only come with romantic partnership, and potential love interests are always reducible to the 

image of them we’ve constructed to define them.  

For others like Delphine, though, in her non-search for a marvel to suddenly erupt in 

life, enough even perhaps to stir her heart, or Mun-suk’s wish to find herself as “the real thing” 

prior to any character all the men around her turn her into, the disruptive force of the disorder 

lurking beneath seeming orders is what makes reality worth cherishing. In an interview 

regarding Conte d’hiver (1992), Rohmer remarks that his characters “can be wise or ‘mad.’ It’s 

never madness as such, but a sort of exaltation, a spiritual fervour, the refusal of a flat reality, 

sometimes even a Don Quixotesque madness. I think Félicie has this kind of gentle madness” 

(Curchod, 2013, p. 112). As does, Delphine, of course, in her own refusal of a “flat reality,” the 

stubbornness of a way of living that wouldn’t be open to all that chance and accident might 

make possible. As she says late in the film, once she’s met the friendly young man in the 

Biarritz train station, an encounter that inspires her to delay her disappointed trip back to Paris 

and spend the afternoon with him in the nearby port town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, “it’s better to 

wait for something than settle for reality.” A Hongian dictum par excellence, suggesting all the 

ways that reality only appears to be the way it is, that marvels and surprises and disruptions are 

lurking all around, and that those might actually be the “real things” amid all that leaves 

Rohmer’s mad hearts so disenchanted and unfulfilled. 

 

Reality’s ordinary miracles 

And it’s on that afternoon trip, in a place she never planned to be with a man chance put 

in front of her like a playing card picked up from the street, where her principle of true and 

genuine attention, the hard work of actually looking rather than inventing your own psychic 

version of what you see, finally pays off.11 Back in Biarritz, she had overheard a group of 



 

 

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elderly travelers discussing Jules Verne’s novel Le Rayon vert (1882), named after the optical 

phenomenon in which a brief shaft of green-tinted light appears, only under very specific 

circumstances, at the last moment before the sun disappears past the horizon. “Do you know 

what Jules Verne said?” one of them explains. “He said when you see the green ray, you can 

read your own feelings, and those of others.” Another playing card found by accident in the 

street, another piece of accidental reality, but one that seems to give Delphine hope that what 

she’s looking for is really out there; if not a gaze that gazes back then at least her own gaze 

reflected back on herself, a moment of clarity when she might see just how much she matters 

whether anyone’s looking back at her or not. “It’s a love story,” the Verne reader had said of 

the novel. “There are characters who are searching for something.” The same, of course, could 

be said for Rohmer’s film, and Hong’s too; though their characters are the kind of searchers 

who aren’t searching for any one specific thing, and if theirs are love stories, then they’re 

ultimately most in love with being alive. 

And when Delphine finally has her own blissful vision, not on a beach but on a bluff 

overlooking the harbor in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, it amounts to the same sort of radiant clarity that 

Mun-suk finds when she’s left alone in Shinduri. She had earlier wept at the fact that she must 

be nothing because no one seems to see anything in her: “We’re talking about showing things 

and I have nothing to show. If I had something to show, then people would see it. That’s all.” 

But in one ecstatic moment, one so accidental, and one that could never be planned, she 

realizes that the fault lies in everyone else’s way of seeing rather than her way of being. Like 

the women Hong’s men chase after, she’s seen (and thus mis-seen) through so many distorting 

lenses, the depressingly myopic eyes of desire, the befuddlement of those who question her 

curious eating habits, her emotional volatility that more laidback friends seem unable to 



 

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283 

understand. But just as Jung-rae believed his cosmic string is not the same thing as the entities 

it holds together, reality doesn’t just have to be these quick pairings-off in cheap clubs in busy 

resort towns at the height of summer, the dreary machinations of Lena’s game-playing. So, 

what does she see at that brief moment when the sun sinks past the horizon, its flash of green 

“like the blade of a sword?” What brings this trembling burst of tears to her eyes? “What do 

you learn?” asks her new male companion, one who’s spent the day just casually being with 

her rather than trying to get her somewhere. “I’d really like to know.” “So would I,” she 

answers, her eyes still fixed on the horizon. And what she finally sees is nothing she can 

express in words aside from a joyful “Yes.”  

 

 

Figure 7. Delphine's bliss upon seeing the miracle of the elusive green ray's flash. 

 

 



 

 

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Surely what she sees is the “real thing” that Mun-suk sees in the world’s small moments 

of beauty, and the very same thing both she and Delphine find in themselves; an accident, 

something you can’t define, a thing that needs no narrative context to explain it, an idiocy, 

Mori’s happiness and Areum’s compassion. She waited long enough and held out hope for long 

enough, and in one miraculous flash, the world has finally stopped being stubborn, and all her 

efforts have paid off. The film’s sublime final moments don’t necessarily even mean the end of 

her loneliness, as her future with Jacques of course remains unknown, at least beyond her 

evident acceptance of accompanying him for a few extra days to Bayonne. Maybe he’s the one 

and maybe he isn’t, though his thoughtful attentiveness toward Delphine at least suggests the 

likeliness of the former; but, no matter what, the green ray’s epiphanic flash at least proves to 

her that the way she’s chosen to live her life has been worth it. Witnessing such an ordinary 

miracle may not even offer much like enlightenment, but having learned how to see miracles 

whenever they come might be meaning enough. 

In an interview with Anne-Christine Loranger, Hong explains a moment in On the 

Beach at Night Alone (2017), when Young-hee kneels on a bridge in Hamburg in a moment of 

supplication echoing Jung-rae’s experience at the three trees in Woman on the Beach. “She is 

looking for a miracle,” Hong says. “A miracle obtained a little too easily. But, of course, she is 

sincere. I can understand her. I can understand why she’s doing this. But the miracle doesn’t 

come by leaning over a bridge. It takes more than that” (Loranger, 2020). And when Loranger 

presses him on what more it takes to arrive at a miracle, Hong offers instead his own 

tautological definition of a miracle, much like Rohmer’s own paradoxical definition regarding 

Rossellini’s film: “A miracle is a miracle because you don’t know how you get it. It’s 

something that comes to you when you don’t expect it” (Loranger, 2020). Like a playing card 



 

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picked up in the street, or an unexpected day spent in a small fishing village with a 

compassionate man, or a moment of unreciprocated kindness from strangers; all these 

fragments of life that need no purpose beyond themselves and that need no meaning but what 

they are in their own ephemeral thereness. So many Hongian miracles all around, waiting to be 

seen by the kind of eye that’s willing to look for them. Jung-rae wanted to explain miracles, but 

both Mun-suk and Delphine know that just being able to see them is enough, and that being 

able to see them means being a part of them. If time isn’t a real thing, as Mori’s book argues, 

then none of our other explanatory narratives or projected frameworks are either; the real thing, 

like each of us, like all the stars, like all this inexplicable reality, is just what’s hiding there in 

plain sight. 

 

REFERENCES: 

Aumont, J. (2017). Idiocies: A Poetics of the Real. Translated by Sis Matthé. Sabzian Hong 
Sang-soo Dossier: Infinite Worlds Possible. 6 May 2020. 
https://www.sabzian.be/text/twice-told-tales. Originally published in Les Variations 
Hong Sang Soo, edited by Simon Daniellou and Antony Flant (De l’incidence, 2017). 

 
Bordwell, D. (2007). Beyond Asian Minimalism: Hong Sangsoo’s Geometry Lesson. In Huh 

Moonyung (Ed.), Hong Sangsoo, translated by Y. Jin-young (pp. 19-29). Korean Film 
Council. 

 
Curchod, O. (2013). Éric Rohmer: Coincidences. In F. Handyside (Ed.), Éric Rohmer: 

Interviews (pp. 111-123). University Press of Mississippi. 
 
Deutelbaum, M. (2012). A closer look at the structure of Hong Sangsoo’s Hahaha. Asian 

Cinema, 23(2), 157-166.  
 
Deutelbaum, M. (2005). The Deceptive Design of Hong Sangsoo's Virgin Stripped Bare by Her 

Bachelors. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 3(2), 187-199. 



 

 

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Deutelbaum, M. (2008). The structure of Hong Sang-soo’s The Power of Kangwon Province. 

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 8(3). 
 
Frodon, J.-M. (2003) Looking for Reality ‘Between the Cracks’. Translated by Sis Matthé. 

Sabzian Hong Sang-soo Dossier: Infinite Worlds Possible. 6 May 2020. 
https://www.sabzian.be/text/twice-told-tales. Originally published as “Chercher la 
réalité <entre les interstices>”, in Le Monde, 26 February 2003. 

 
Gerke, G. (2019). Nearer My Hong Sang-soo To Me. Mubi Notebook, 19 April. 

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/nearer-my-hong-sang-soo-to-me. 
 
Grosoli, M. (2010). Moral Tales from Korea. Hong Sang-Soo and Eric Rohmer. Acta 

Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 3, 95-108. 
 
Handyside, F. (2009). Rohmer à la plage: The role of the beach in three films by Eric Rohmer. 

Studies in French Cinema, 9(2), 147-160.  
 
Hartzell, A. and D. Pacquet. (nd) The Hong Sangsoo Page. Korean Film Archive,  

https://koreanfilm.org//hongsangsoo.html. 
 
Huh, M. (2007). Interview with Hong Sangsoo. In Huh Moonyung (Ed.), Hong Sangsoo, 

translated by Yook Jin-young (pp. 39-91). Korean Film Council. 
 
Kim, K. H. (2004). The remasculinization of Korean cinema. Duke University Press.  
 
Ferreira, F., & Gester, J. (2015). Infinite Worlds Possible: Hong Sangsoo’s Right Now, Wrong 

Then.(Interview). Cinema Scope, (64). https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-
magazine/infinite-worlds-possible-hong-sangsoos-right-now-wrong-then. 

 
Leigh, J (2012). The Cinema of Éric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social World. 

Continuum. 
 



 

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Levinas, E. (1987). Freedom and Command. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by 
Alphonso Lingis (pp. 15-24). Duquesne University Press. 

 
Lippit, A. M. (2004). Hong Sangsoo's lines of inquiry, communication, defense, and escape. 

Film Quarterly, 57(4), 22-30.  
 
Loranger, A.-C. (2017). A Cigarette with Hong Sang-soo. Translator unspecified. Sabzian 

Hong Sang-soo Dossier: Infinite Worlds Possible. 6 May 2020. 
https://www.sabzian.be/text/twice-told-tales. Originally published in Séquences, vol. 
308, May/June 2017. 

 
Mazierska, E. (2002). Road to authenticity and stability: Representation of holidays, relocation 

and movement in the films of Eric Rohmer. tourist studies, 2(3), 223-246. 
 
McKibbin, T. (2013) Effects of the Real. Reverse Shot, 28 April. 
   http://www.reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/541/atricle/womanbeach. 
 
McKibbin, T. (2010). Following the Law of One’s Own Being: The Crying Woman in The 

Green Ray. Senses of Cinema, 54, April.https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/feature-
articles/following-the-law-of-ones-own-being-the-crying-woman-in-the-green-ray/.  

 
Quandt, J. (2012). Déjà vu. DVD liner notes for The Day He Arrives, Cinema Guild, 2012. 
 
Quandt, J. (2007). Twice-Told Tales: James Quandt on the Films of Hong Sang-soo. Artforum 

International, 55(10), 468-74.  
 
Raymond, M. (2014). Hong Sang-soo and the film essay. New Review of Film and Television 

Studies, 12(1), 22-36.  
 
Rohmer, É. (1986) The Land of the Miracles. In J. Hillier Ed. Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: 

New-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (pp. 205-208). Harvard University Press. 
 
Sight & Sound. “Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, All Voters.” British Film 

Institute, https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/972.  
 



 

 

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Small, C. (2016). Hong Sang-soo: Modernist Romance. Mubi Notebook, 21 June. 
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Small, C. (2017). There Is No Such Thing as Reality: Hong Sang-soo Discusses On the Beach 

at Night Alone. Mubi Notebook, 18 February.  https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/there-
is-no-such-thing-as-reality-hong-sang-soo-discusses-on-the-beach-at-night-alone.  

 
Unger, M. (2012). Hong Sangsoo’s codes of parallelism. Asian Cinema, 23(2), 141-156. 
 
Vincze, T. (2019). Showing the Complexity of the Simple–The Art-puzzle of Hong Sang-soo. 

Panoptikum, 22(29): 173-188.  

 

ENDNOTES: 

 

 
1 The quote, frequently cited but of unclear provenance, is linked to a press kit assembled by 
Adrien Gombeaud to accompany the release of Woman is the Future of Man (2004). See 
Hartzell and Pacquet. Similarly, Hong elsewhere remarks that “fragments of memory, dream, 
imagination, and fragments of reality are just different in name only, but they all share 
homogeneity” (Huh, 60). 
 
2 Hong’s later films will come to be more frequently grounded in their female characters. Our 
Sunhi (2013) and Yourself and Yours (2016) each explore women confronting men’s persistent 
habit of turning them into projections, with one heroine asserting her own independence against 
men’s desire-driven uselessness and the other playfully asserting her own kind of revenge. 
 
3 In an interview with Roger Koza for Cinema Scope in 2015, Hong somewhat hilariously 
resorts to constructing two diagrams of his own in order to illustrate his ideas behind the 
doubled reality of Right Now, Wrong Then (2015): “Imagine this rectangle is real life. I try to 
come as close as possible to it.”  
 

 



 

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4 Mori, in Hill of Freedom, with his moment of communion with a flower, seems an exception 
to this usually gendered rule. Though given that Mori is Japanese rather than Korean, he might 
end up proving the normal distinction after all, given the fact that Hong’s withering judgment is 
always aimed at a distinctively Korean kind of masculine type. For the most detailed reading of 
the Korean specificity of Hong’s crisis of masculinity, see Kyung Hyun Kim, The 
Remasculization of Korean Cinema, Chapter 7: “Two Early, Too Late: Temporality and 
Repetition in Hong Sang-soo’s films.” Placing Hong’s earliest films within the context of 
South Korea’s rapid modernization after the end of its dictatorship, Kim suggests that Hong’s 
deflated masculine egos are exemplary of a society that hasn’t yet fully overcome its traumas 
by being able to move into any substantively meaningful future. His characters “become fully 
entrapped by their retroactive circuit,” such that “their movements fail to thrust forward and 
return only to the point of origin even after their desires have been physically fulfilled through 
sex” (210). 
 
5 Touchingly, Hong goes on to explain how the film’s ending was inspired by two seemingly 
innocuous moments of what we could call “idiotic” reality in his own life. One is a moment 
directly echoing Moon-suk’s, with his car trapped in a beach’s sand and his crew rushing to 
help him out, but the second suggests more ineffable connections: “I was surprised when 
someone hit me in the arm really hard. It was summer and I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. I 
looked back and saw a middle-aged woman with a baby on her back turning red. I found out 
that she slapped me to catch a mosquito biting my arm. She apologized by saying, ‘I’m so 
embarrassed.’ She was a stranger to me, but when she saw a mosquito sucking my blood, she 
slapped me in spite of herself. Her look and her words stayed with me for a long time” (Huh 
85-87). 
 
6 Elsewhere, writing about The Day He Arrives, Quandt even suggests that Hong inherited his 
idiosyncratic use of the zoom from Rohmer: “Odd as it may seem, Hong’s inspiration for 
reviving this cheesy device might ne none other than the ultra-subtle Eric Rohmer, who has 
often been cited as the Korean director’s formative influence. Rohmer’s slow, discreet zooms 
delicately pinion his characters within the frame, prodding them to disclose their inner beings, 
which they falteringly, sometimes fatuously do. (See, in particular, Le Rayon vert) Hong turns 
his frames into traps, employing his static shots, long takes, and zooms to lock his similarly 

 



 

 

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garrulous and self-deluding creatures in the inescapable image, intensifying their physical 
unease and social awkwardness with his relentless inspection” (Quandt 2012). 
 
7 See also, Marco Grosoli, “Moral Tales from Korea,” for a detailed reading of the points of 
convergence of the filmmaker’s approach to mise-en-scène, especially in Hong’s Night and 
Day.  
 
8 Rohmer’s film, notably, appeared on Hong’s submission of his ten favorite films for Sight & 
Sound’s “Greatest Films of all Time” poll in 2012 (a list that, notably, also features Dreyer’s 
Ordet (1955), one of film history’s most famed on-screen miracles. 

 



 

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Volume 9.1 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.326 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

291 

 

 

 
9 For a thorough account of Rohmer’s improvisatory methods in making Le Rayon vert, his first 
film without a script since La Collectionneuse (1967), see Jacob Leigh, The Cinema of Éric 
Rohmer (pp. 127-32). 
 
10 See also Fiona Handyside, “Rohmer à la plage,” where she explores the way that the city’s 
ills have a way of following Rohmer’s characters to the promised freedom that the idea of the 
beach vacation’s escape represents: “The beach is turned into an urban site precisely through 
the presence of a crowd, all of whom are trying to escape each other…. The beach is a place 
onto which [Delphine] projects her romantic longings, which contradict the reality being shown 
to us by the documentary force of Rohmer’s camera” (154). 
 
11 Jacques first notices Delphine in the train station because she’s reading Dostoevsky’s The 
Idiot, itself the result of a happy accident in the film’s production, as Rohmer himself was 
struck by the fact that Riviére happened to be reading it. As Rohmer explained: “It wasn’t a 
choice, it was a coincidence, a miracle. In this film, there are only coincidences. This was pure 
chance. It happened that she was reading the book, I don’t know why. If she had been reading a 
book which I didn’t like, perhaps I would have said ‘let’s find another.’ But when I saw her 
reading The Idiot, I said ‘Ah, it’s fantastic that Delphine would be reading The Idiot’” (quoted 
in Leigh 302).